Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100People 32 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine from top: waterford whispers; Shauna Doerr 4. Bowdoin grad Anthony Doerr cuts through the darkness in his breakout novel All the Light We Cannot See. Fantastic Light T hey say ‘write what you know,’ but Anthony Doerr dared to stray far from his comfort zone…and he’s got a Pulitzer to prove it. Doerr’s fourth book, All the Light We Cannot See, is a spellbind- ing 544-page novel 10 years in the making, set amid the devastation of Europe during the Second World War. In addition to the Pulitzer, All the Light We Cannot See has won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excel- lence in Fiction in 2015, spent 49 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold an estimated two million copies. A native Clevelander who currently lives in Boise, Idaho, Doerr moved to Maine at 18 to attend Bowdoin College, but recalls more vividly the scenery around its campus rather than within the ivy-covered walls where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once studied. “One of my older brothers went to Bates. I assumed that’s what you do–you get older, you go to college in Maine. I was lucky enough to go to Bowdoin, where I made friends with kids from South Paris and Rumford. I started spending as much time as I could in the state’s mountains and rivers and on the coasts with those guys, fishing for stripers, skiing, climbing, things like that.” This rough-and-tumble college experience sounds fitting of a man who last year told The Guardian, “I grew up where to call yourself a writer would be precocious. Or pretentious.” However, the writer’s relationship with the state began much earlier. “As a snail-obsessed 11-year-old–or may- be 12?–I went to oceanography camp on Mount Desert Island: tidal pooling, clam- bering over rocks, hunting horseshoe crabs and anemones. Was I ever happier? Later that same summer I discovered Stephen King, and Maine was in my blood ever since.” Which has led to deeper investigations. “I was discovering Maine writers like Law- rence Sargent Hall and Sarah Orne Jewett and Edna St. Vincent Millay, writers who paid attention to birds and fish and the col- ors of the sky at night, the sound of the snow in winter–these things all spilled into my notebooks, my head, my soul.” Doerr’s most vividly rendered memo- ry of Maine, however, isn’t so halcyon. Af- ter graduating from Bowdoin, he went on a fishing trip to Rapid River between Range- ley and the New Hampshire border. After stumbling and smashing his knee against a rock, Doerr sat down to recover and eat lunch, only to pass out and slump, head first, into the water: “How long was I gone? A few seconds? A year? At some point I was jerked back in- to this world. My father’s fist had seized the The walled citadel of Saint-Malo in Brittany,France provides the background to part of Bowdoin gradAnthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel AllThe LightWe Cannot See..